Educational uses of Social bookmarking tools
Zahra Bibak (24.01.1392) Educational uses of Social bookmarking tools ' ' ' ' ' '''Introduction ' The new genre of educational social software has seen the development of social bookmarking tools which lend themselves to use by groups to exchange, share and organize information. Like wikis, these tools enable learners to share spaces and resources and can be particularly effective to support group activities. Teachers try to bring new technologies into their classes to increase the outcomes. Social bookmarking is one of these technologies which they try to use in the process of teaching. Diigo is one of the most popular tools of social bookmarking which can be used for education. ' ' 'Educational Applications Social bookmarking tools ' Social bookmarking tools are an emerging educational technology that has been drawing more of educators' attention over the last several years. Both students and teachers use social bookmarking tools outside the class (not as a curriculum) to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. This technology offers knowledge sharing solutions and a social platform for interactions and discussions Recently, social bookmarking has become very popular in education. Many teachers complete and handout reading lists for students to use in assignments; this would be simplified and made more accessible by using a link to an online version of the teacher's preferred lists electronically through a social bookmarking site. Both teachers and students can create a group account with a shared password. An advancement of this would be to create a unique tag for all group related links. Many social bookmarking sites also allow teachers to review and comment on links submitted by their students. ' ' 'Educational Applications of Diigo ' In the education setting, we all know that project-based learning is an effective way to teach students and cultivate their skills of finding, organizing, synthesizing, and presenting information, as well as the social skills of working in groups, all of which are necessary in the knowledge-based economy. Among the web 2.0 technologies, Diigo is a great tool for this kind of exploratory and collaborative learning. Diigo is an abbreviation for the ‘Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff’. In addition to the social bookmarking aspects, Diigo allows you to highlight parts of a webpage and attach sticky notes that can be either made private or public – perfect for class collaboration! Just as a student may highlight particular text in lecture notes or use sticky notes in books, Diigo has the advantage of doing this online. It encourages active e-reading and retention of information. Whilst other social bookmarking sites only save the link, Diigo can select, save and share text and pictures. Diigo allows students and teachers to take personal notes and highlight text information on web pages just as they would on a piece of paper. They can then bookmark and save this information for further review, while adding tags to keep everything organized. In bookmarking this information, they can also choose to share with colleagues and friends to allow them to access the web page, view their notes and highlights, and add their own annotations. All of this information is also saved online and can be accessed by any computer or browser, including cell phones with browsing capabilities. Social bookmarking tools have several purposes in an academic setting including: organizing and categorizing web pages for efficient retrieval; keeping tagged pages accessible from any networked computer; sharing needed or desired resources with other users; accessing tagged pages with RSS feeds, cell phones and PDAs for increased mobility; allowing librarians and instructors the capability to follow students' progress; and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries. '''The Use of Social Bookmarking Tools in Vocational Education ♦'Setting up a Collaborative Account ' Create a class delicious account to work collaboratively on areas of your vocational curriculum. Students can suggest class specific tags and get into the habit of contributing to the account. Discussion can then take place as to the value of each in relation to a given topic. ' ' ♦'Networks ' Using tags that relate to your area of vocational teaching, research other users that have added particular sites to their accounts and add them to your Network. Encourage all students to create their own delicious accounts, and be added to the Network so they will automatically keeping abreast of the classes web resources. ' ' ♦'Homework & Work-Based Assignments ' Teachers can add to the delicious account specific websites that they want the students to access as part of a homework of work-based assignment. The students can be encouraged to build a delicious-based group of links as part of their assignment submission. ' ' ♦'Develop Research and Digital Literacy Skills ' Develop research and digital literacy skills in students by rating and reviewing websites and recommending them to their peers. A valuable exercise would be for students to evaluate the validity of information obtained online with the information they have from the course on the same subject. Zahra Bibak